Mining the Oort by Frederik Pohl

his own in this strange party, where people kept trying to impress other people rather than make them feel partyishly happy. The most striking thing was the established pecking order: the richest deferred to by the not-quite-as-rich, and the one Martian couple among the guests condescended to by all. That bothered Dekker. Yet even the Martians were smiling as though they were enjoying all this opulence and laughter.
    And the blocky young Earthie, Evan, kept refilling Dekker's glass, and everything around him seemed even brighter and more beautiful and exciting . . . right up to the time he felt himself being picked up and carried.
    "Where'd you come from?" he croaked, twisting around to stare into the face of Tinker Gorshak.
    "Came to get you, you idiot," Gorshak snarled. "I knew you'd make a fool of yourself. Shut up. What you need is a good night's sleep.

11
     
     
    No matter how badly you want water and air, there are limits. You certainly don't want a hundred billion tons of anything crashing into your planet in one lump. That would cloud the skies with more dust than even Mars has seen for a very long time, not to mention shaking up everything around.
    So you have to take some precautions. Before your approaching comet gets that far, you site demolition charges in its core, carefully placed to shatter it into the tiniest pieces you can manage. (The pieces won't be all that tiny, anyway, but still.) Most of the fragments will burn up or at least volatilize from air friction—even Mars's thin air is enough to do that—and the seismic impacts of the residues as they strike will be, you hope, tolerable.
    You don't want them crashing into the surface at an excessively high velocity, either. So you navigate your comet to come up on the planet from behind, so that both are going in the same orbital direction around the Sun and the combined speeds are minimized. Then, at that last moment, you fire the deceleration jets from the Augenstein drives you have forethoughtfully already installed in the comet in order to slow it still more—so that your impact velocity isn't much more than one or two kilometers a second. Then you jettison the Augensteins, cross your fingers, and hope.

12
     
     
    Dekker didn't get a good night's sleep after all, or at least not as much of it as he really wanted; it seemed only minutes had passed before his mother was shaking him awake. "Are you all right, Dekker?" she was asking anxiously. "I didn't think you'd want to miss seeing the impact."
    He fended her off, wincing. Someone was pounding nails into his head. Tinker Gorshak was standing over him with a cup of something hot. "Strong tea," Gorshak muttered. "Go ahead, drink it. You'll be all right in a while, hangovers never kill anybody."
    And after a few scalding gulps and an eternity of throbbing temples, it began to seem that Tinker Gorshak was right. When the pounding behind his eyes began to subside Dekker bundled up in a robe before the news screen and watched what was happening. The time was impact minus thirty minutes, and on the screen he could see the comet's drive jets detaching themselves and hurling themselves away, bright and tiny shooting stars, to be captured and salvaged by the workers in the tender spacecraft. There weren't any additional burns after that; now the comet was purely ballistic.
    Dekker sipped his tea and began to feel almost human again—human enough to begin replaying the scenes of the party in his mind. "You know," he announced, astonished at his discovery, "she didn't really like me. She only invited me to make that other guy jealous."
    "Earthies," Gorshak grumbled, looking at his watch. "In about two minutes now—"
    "I don't think they even like each other," Dekker went on, thinking it through. "Evan was always making jokes about the Japanese and the Brazilians, and they were mean kinds of jokes, too."
    "Of course they don't like each other. Don't you know yet what Earthies are like? They used to have wars